Frank Lloyd Wright |

Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Advertisement

Supported by

Frank Lloyd Wright

News about Frank Lloyd Wright, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

The events that make the life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright are eye popping: his mother-coddled childhood in a broken Victorian home; his hit-and-miss education; his youthful flight in the 1880s from rustic Wisconsin to booming Chicago; his use, in the studios of that singular architect Louis Sullivan, of a T square as a bludgeon in a fight to the finish with a fellow employee who had wounded him with a drafting knife; a first marriage that produced six children and a house that is now a museum; a midlife affair with a client, leading to his abandonment of family and a thriving architectural office; the arson and ax murders by a hired hand at Taliesin, the great house in Wisconsin that he designed for his mistress and her children; his arrests under the Mann Act; the madness of his second wife (there would be a third); the triumph that came with the construction in Tokyo of his Imperial Hotel; the astonishing revitalization of his career during the Depression with that icon of modernism, Fallingwater; the grand gesture of the Guggenheim Museum; a lifetime of profligate spending and persistent money troubles -- all this along with his dandification, scenery-chewing, braggadocio and his late-life stature as the scold of American civilization.

Wright, who died just short of 92 in 1959, lived a life too melodramatic for Hollywood, but it continues to engage our attention. In 1932 he gave us an entertaining version in his "Autobiography," published when he was in his mid-60's and his career was in the doldrums.

In her 2004 biography of Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright: Big Houses on the Prairie, Ada Louise Huxtable, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, writes that his Prairie and later houses were the homilies of a "conservative, moralistic, deeply old-fashioned, emphatically individualistic" scion of an immigrant Welsh Unitarian family. Although the houses looked radical, Wright saw them as exemplifying eternal verities. This was just one of the paradoxes we find in the man. Perhaps the central one was his belief in the sanctity of family life, while he lived outside the accepted moral code. In defending his infidelities, he said, in effect, it depends on what you mean by morality. -- James F. O'Gorman